During a livestream this weekend, Strangers in Paradise creator Terry Moore told fans that he plans to write a new graphic novel in 2024, which he will crowdfund on Kickstarter. The as-yet-untitled book will be set in space, and will be a hybrid of comics and prose, an approach Moore has taken before. The story will not be a part of the “Terryverse,” the shared universe that has connected all of Moore’s existing comics. Robyn Moore, his wife and publisher, also said that she thinks they may be done with single-issue comics and moving fully into original graphic novels in the future.
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Moore, who is celebrating 30 years in the comics industry this year, also announced that both the Kickstarter campaign and a “cleaning out the warehouse” kind of sale will be launching during the next “Terry Moore Live” weekend in April 2024.
“One of the ideas that keeps coming up so much is space,” Moore said. “I’m really fascinated with space, and Robyn and I both have been really noticing the full moon and the other night, Venus was outside our window, it was super bright, so we’ve really been looking up a lot lately and thinking about that — space….So I’m working on designs for my new book, and I’m working on character designs. Robyn had a wonderful idea for a story, and we’ve kind of had a creative talk about what the story would be, and I really love what we’ve come up with, so now it’s all about finding the character and the ideas that we were talking about — designing the sets, designing the look. One other thing that I thought about right off the bat was, man, I really want it to be in color. Oh, that costs so much money. So I had to talk somebody into it. We know somebody wonderful to do that. I think space stories need to be in color, or it’s flat. I don’t want to draw just a bunch of white ships and black space.”
“It’s going to be a Kickstarter,” Robyn Moore added. “It’s not going to be single issues. I think we’re done with single issues. I shouldn’t say that, but I think for now we’re done with single issues.”
You can see the full video below.
After noting that the plan is to have prose and comics alternating in the new book, Moore pointed out that it’s not exactly new to him. Holding up a collected edition of some early Strangers in Paradise comics, he pointed out some examples.
“When you get into the early Strangers in Paradise series, I was doing that a lot,” Moore added. “When it was time to see something, I showed it to you. When it as time to see the details about what’s in the cabinet, the drawer, and all the segue stuff, I ‘prosed’ it…and then back and forth. I even blended it with dialogue and art. I was just trying to think outside the box. I wanted every page to look different in Strangers in Paradise, including songs and things like that. For me, working like that was very immersive. I was trying to flesh out the whole world. It wasn’t about, ‘Oh, it’s a comic book, hopefully it’s well-crafted.’ It wasn’t about that anymore, it was about, let’s dive into this world and see everything we could see and read the subtext and show the music and songs and poetry and everything else. And I think it becomes more like an immersive, 3D virtual experience that way. The book becomes a way to dive into a world and see it from many angles instead of just the cartoonist’s pencil.”
